Engineering consent: The New York Times' role in
promoting war on Iraq

By Antony Loewenstein

March 23, 2004 "Sydney Morning Herald"

This is the first 'Engineering consent' column by
Antony Loewenstein, to focus on the inside workings of big media.

“One of the most entrenched and disturbing
features of American journalism [is] its pack mentality. Editors and
journalists don’t like to diverge too sharply from what everyone else
is writing.” Michael Massing, The New York Review of Books,
February 26, 2004

“In April 2003, CNN aired footage of a marine in
Baghdad who is confronted with a crowd of angry Iraqis. He shouts back
in frustration, “We’re here for your fucking freedom!” George
Packer, The New Yorker, November 24, 2003

The one-year anniversary of the Iraq invasion is upon
us and Iraq is teetering on the brink of civil war. The main rationale
of the war, as frequently stated by George W. Bush, Tony Blair and John
Howard, was Saddam’s supposed arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD)
and their threat to the Middle East region and the world. No weapons
have ever been found.

When Howard addressed
the Australian people on March 20, 2003 to announce Australia’s
commitment to the invasion, he frequently mentioned Iraq’s links to
terrorism and possession of WMD. Not once did he mention the human
rights of the Iraqi people. This war wasn’t about liberation or
freedom or democracy. Not in 2003 anyway. It was about unilateral US
power and a country not wanting to be left behind in the new world order
of might is right politics fashioned by the Bush administration's Dick
Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz.

“The impact of the cruise missiles can still be
seen in the telecommunications tower across the Tigris. The Ministry of
Defence still lies in ruins. Half the government ministries in Baghdad
are still fire-stained, a necessary reminder of the cancer of arson that
took hold of the people of this city in the first hours and days of
their "liberation".

"But the symbols of the war are not the scars of
last year's invasion. The real folly of our invasion can be seen in the
fortresses that the occupiers are building, the ramparts of steel and
concrete and armour with which the Americans have now surrounded
themselves. Like Crusaders, they are building castles amid the people
they came to "save", to protect themselves from those who were
supposed to have greeted them with flowers.”

So how much more do we know now than one year ago? An
incalculable amount. We know that Iraq had (probably) no WMD; it posed
no military threat to its neighbours, and much less to America, Britain
or Australia. Al-Qaeda had no relationship with Saddam’s regime, but
now has an unidentifiable presence in Iraq. Jihadists and Islamic
fundamentalists couldn’t have been given a more beautiful gift in
their war against the West. We must question those who claim Bin Laden
and his ideologues are illogical or even insane. His numerous statements
before and after September 11 suggest a philosophy based on short term
and long term tactical goals. He has arguably achieved many of the
former. Saudi Arabia will soon no longer house American troops, as they
will move to Iraq and Qatar. A clash of civilizations is occurring
between those fearful of US hegemony and those keen to embrace the
ethics and morality of US unilateralism. The Islamic world is torn
between condemning the brutality of al-Qaeda style terrorism and
embracing the sheer audacity of taking on US world spectral dominance.
The Madrid bombings, and the subsequent dumping of a pro-Bush leader
(and the al-Qaeda statement saying its martyrdom operations would cease
until Spain’s new leader outlined his new policy towards Iraq) prove
that Bin Laden has definite (achievable) aims in his war against Western
“decadence” and “imperialism”.

With Iraq in the headlines daily, it is tempting to
claim we are receiving the full picture of Iraq’s political and social
situation. Much of the Western media, including in Australia, have
started questioning the pre-war claims of Bush, Blair and Howard in
relation to WMDs and the West’s increased risk of terrorism after our
involvement in the invasion.

But where were these inquisitive journalists before
the war? How many questions were they asking to the skeptical
intelligence officers before March 2003? Were they listening to Scott
Ritter, former UN weapon inspector, who’d been claiming Iraq had been
“fundamentally disarmed” years before the invasion?

"Terrorism is the chief threat we face, and
the war against terror must unite us all. This has little to do with
Iraq. Attacks against the occupiers were provoked by war. Attacks in
Israel are part of a different struggle for Palestinian liberation. The
assault in Madrid is part of a longer confrontation between militant
Islam and western cultural and economic imperialism. Lumping them all
together as evidence that a war against terror is the primary object of
our foreign policy is nonsense.”

There has been an explosion of mainstream media more
than happy to lampoon Bush, Blair and Howard on their pre-war claims on
WMD. Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, is a perfect example
as he wrote in August 2003 that “Iraq may well prove to be the biggest
scandal in American politics in the last hundred years”. The New
York Times, The Washington Post, The Sydney Morning Herald
and a host of other worldwide media titles have been equally critical of
the glaring absence of WMD. But there has been little examination of
pre-war reporting and supporting of government claims on WMD. The media
has a short-term memory problem. Self-examination is not something to be
considered.

The media was the filter through which skeptical
publics were slowly convinced of the need to invade Iraq. And it was the
channel through which intelligence reports on Iraq’s chemical,
biological and nuclear programs were amplified and exaggerated. Too many
journalists in the world’s most respected publications became
unquestioning messengers of their government's desired message. And
Australia was far from immune.

***

The New York Times is arguably the most
respected newspaper in the world. Its articles are reprinted in
publications in numerous countries, including Australia’s Sydney
Morning Herald and The Age.

Judith Miller is one of the NYT's most senior
journalists. A Pulitzer Prize winning writer and regarded expert on
Middle East issues and WMD, Miller has written extensively on Osama Bin
Laden and the al-Qaeda network.

In the run-up to the Iraq War, Miller became a key
reporter on that country’s supposedly documented WMDs. She wrote many
articles relayed around the globe on the Bush administration’s
doomsday reading of Saddam’s regime. She painted a terrifying picture
of his arsenal with apparently sound intelligence sources to back her
claims.

However, it emerged that the vast majority of her WMD
claims came through Ahmed Chalabi, an indicted fraudster and one of the
leading figures in the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the group keen to
militarily overthrow Saddam. Miller relied on untested defectors’
testimonies (usually provided by Chalabi) to write several front-page
stories on this information. Michael Massing from Columbia Journalism
Review suggests her
stories were “far too reliant on sources sympathetic to the (Bush)
administration".

"Those with dissenting views – and there
were more than a few – were shut out.”

For example, the NYT reported in 2003 on Iraq’s
supposed mobile weapons labs, after an announcement by Secretary of
State Colin Powell on February 5, 2003 to the UN Security Council.
Sourced by Chalabi, this information was given by a defector. It soon
emerged that US investigators had not interrogated this person, yet it
published in TNY as fact. (Some months later, experts agreed the labs
were for civilian use). It is therefore unsurprising that an increasing
number of American citizens came to see the war on Iraq as a necessary
step on the US’s so-called “War on Terror”.

The Washington Post confirmed on March 5, 2004
that:

“U.S. officials are trying to get access to the
Iraqi engineer to verify his story ... particularly because intelligence
officials have discovered that he is related to a senior official in
Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, a group of Iraqi exiles who
actively encouraged the United States to invade Iraq.”

And in an interview with London’s Telegraph
in early February 2004, Chalabi claimed his pre-war intelligence’s
accuracy was no
longer relevant:

“We are heroes in error ... As far as we're
concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and
the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The
Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. We're ready to fall on
our swords if he wants."

How much of this explosive information was plastered
across the front pages of the Australian media? The major source of
American intelligence on Iraq’s supposed threat claims to be “heroes
in error” and our media ignores the revelation.

When Bush, Blair or Howard released dossiers of
supposed proof in 2002 and 2003 of Iraq’s WMD, the newspapers
dutifully reported its contents and generally accepted its findings. As
with so much propaganda, when information is spoken or channeled by
establishment figures, our media takes it at face value. Dissenters or
questioners of government power are never given the same treatment. This
is because Western media generally likes to propagate the myth that
Western governments are generally benign and out to do positive in the
world, with any “mistakes” being rare aberrations. Our elected
officials would never commit war crimes in our name, surely? (The New
Yorker’s Seymour Hersh reported
the battles between the Bush administration and intelligence officials
in October 2003.)

An unnamed US State Department Official said in early
February 2003, in relation to Chalabi’s claims in the run up to the
Iraq War, that:

“What Chalabi told us we accepted in good faith.
Now there is going to be a lot of question marks over his motives.”

Accepted in good faith. Trawling through the archives,
I cannot find one journalist claiming that any of his or her
intelligence sources were based on “good faith”. When writing about
Iraq’s WMD arsenal, reporters from the major newspapers wrote with
certainty and clarity. No equivocation. No hesitation.

Judith Miller, “embedded” during the war with the
US Army's 75th Mobile Exploitation Team searching for Iraq’s elusive
WMD, reported in The Age on April 22, 2003 that "a scientist
who claims to have worked in Iraq's chemical weapons program for more
than a decade has told an American military team that Iraq destroyed
chemical weapons and biological warfare equipment only days before the
war began.”

This “scientist” source was never mentioned again,
and The Age has never printed a correction to this
misinformation. Indeed, the NYT has never apologised for any of
Miller’s stories.

Is there not a responsibility to acknowledge that one
of your senior reporters got so many of her Iraq stories wrong?
Apparently newspapers hope their readers have very short memories.

In a further indication of the corruption of the
reporting on Iraq’s WMD, US based news service Knight Ridder reported
in March 2004:

“The former Iraqi exile group that gave the Bush
administration exaggerated and fabricated intelligence on Iraq also fed
much of the same information to newspapers, news agencies and magazines
in the United States, Britain and Australia ... A June 26, 2002 letter
from the Iraqi National Congress to the (US) Senate Appropriations
Committee listed 108 articles based on information provided by the Iraqi
National Congress’s information Collection Program, a US funded effort
to collect intelligence in Iraq.”

How many of those 108 stories were republished in
Australian newspapers, and how many of them contained misleading or
outright untrue information? How many were corrected when the truthful
information finally became available? And how did these false news
stories contribute to the general public’s feelings about our
involvement in the invasion?

***

Who is Judith Miller? According to a
report in Editor and Publisher by William E. Jackson Jr., she
is “not a neutral, nor an objective journalist”:

“This can be acceptable, if you're a great
reporter, ‘but she ain't, and that's why she's a propagandist,’
stated one old New York Times hand...”

Regarded as a neo-conservative with a deep sympathy
for the Bush administration’s agenda and a vocal supporter of
Saddam’s overthrow, Miller has close links with the pro-Israeli camp,
some of whom have channelled Israeli intelligence through her work.
(Many groups and individuals sharing the Sharon perspective have long
championed taking out Saddam and fed US intelligence and journalists
information leading to the conclusion that Saddam was a grave threat to
the world and the Jewish state.)

Miller’s reporting on Iraq’s WMD was constantly
flawed and yet her senior editors gave her carte blanche to continue
being the main conduit through these serious issues were covered in the
NYTimes. Indeed, her transgressions make the Jayson Blair fiasco seem
relatively minor. (Blair was a young, black Times journalist exposed as
a serial liar and plagiarist. He recently wrote a book of his
experiences titled 'Burning Down My Master’s House'.)

Senior editors at the NYT still claim that Miller
delivered many world exclusives on Iraq’s WMD. The problem was most of
them were incorrect, frequently sourced to unchecked defectors or
suspect intelligence. William Jackson gives an example:

“The “Madam Smallpox” article of last Dec. 3
[2002], for example, turned out to be one of the worst cases. As Dafna
Linzer of the Associated Press has written, the alleged 1990 transfer of
the virus to Iraq never took place. The idea of an especially virulent
strain of smallpox, to which Miller gave so much credibility, has been
generally discounted in the scientific community. Talk to scientists in
the field, as I have done recently, and they will tell you that Miller
is inaccurate and that she doesn't really understand the
processes.“embedded” during the war with the US Army's 75th Mobile
Exploitation Team, searching for Iraq’s elusive WMD.

"Her smallpox article was a piece of structured
propaganda from start to finish, based on a single source making
allegations to the CIA. As one Times source told me: 'There were more
red flags on this story than in Moscow on May Day.' In fact, the Times
over time have ignored multiple warnings from senior staff (and
colleagues such as Baghdad based John Burns) about Miller's
reporting.”

Then in May 2003, The Washington Post
discovered an
internal email between Burns and Miller (The Sydney Morning
Herald ran this story in brief in May). Burns was incensed that
Miller was writing a piece on Chalabi and hadn’t run the information
past him. Miller acknowledged that the vast majority of her sources came
from Chalabi:

“I've been covering Chalabi for about 10 years,
and have done most of the stories about him for our paper, including the
long takeout we recently did on him. He has provided most of the front
page exclusives on WMD to our paper.”

While Miller was “embedded” with the US army
searching for Iraq’s WMD, Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post
reported on May 26, 2003:

“In an April 21 [2003] front-page story, she
[Miller] reported that a leading Iraqi scientist claimed Iraq had
destroyed chemical and biological weapons days before the war began,
according to the Alpha team. She said the scientist had ‘pointed to
several spots in the sand where he said chemical precursors and other
weapons material were buried'.

“Behind that story was an interesting arrangement.
Under the terms of her accreditation, Miller wrote, ‘this reporter was
not permitted to interview the scientist or visit his home. Nor was she
permitted to write about the discovery of the scientist for three days,
and the copy was then submitted for a check by military officials. Those
officials asked that details of what chemicals were uncovered be
deleted.’

“Since then, no evidence has surfaced to support
these claims and the Alpha team is preparing to leave Iraq without
having found weapons of mass destruction.”

Again, the Times have never printed an apology or
correction of this story. How many newspapers around the world
republished Miller’s articles as gospel? Andrew Rosenthal, assistant
managing editor for foreign news at the Times, was quoted last May as
“completely comfortable” with Miller’s reporting, because “all
the information was attributed to MET Alpha [Miller’s “embedded”
unit], not 'senior U.S. officials' or some other vague formulation.”

Rosenthal’s reasoning makes no sense. MET Alpha Unit
was searching for Iraq’s WMD on information supplied by Chalabi’s
Iraqi National Congress. MET Alpha and the US Government are hardly
separate entities, but were guided by similarly misleading information.
Heroes in error, indeed. (Slate
has more on the motivations of Chalabi.)

In the March 8, 2004 edition of Newsweek,
reporter Christopher Dickey explained the power of Chalabi in Iraq:

(He) is now head of the Governing Council's
economic and finance committee. As such he has overseen the appointment
of the minister of oil, the minister of finance, the central bank
governor, the trade minister, the head of the trade bank and the
designated managing director of the largest commercial bank in the
country.”

If Miller and the NYT were used by Chalabi to push his
“certainties” on Iraq’s WMD, he has ended up a winner while the
Times’ reputation has taken a battering.

Jim Lobe of the Inter Press Service offers an
explanation for Miller's and the Times’ behaviour in February this
year. And Derek Seidman wrote in Counterpunch
in February this year that he'd seen Miller speak at a public forum in
the US where she was quizzed over her reporting on WMD, reliance on
Chalabi and ideological beliefs.

“Yes, she at last admitted, the US has supported
repressive regimes, 'and we did so in the context of a Cold War we had
to win'. Foreign policy is not fun, she angrily informed us, and
sometimes one needs to choose between two evils. If we didn't do what we
had done in the Middle East, it could now be "a whole region of
Irans", and how would we like that?"

Jack Shafer wrote in Slate
last July that a thorough examination of Miller is required:

“The most important question to unravel about
Judith Miller's reporting is this: Has she grown too close to her
sources to be trusted to get it right or to recant her findings when
it's proved that she got it wrong? Because the Times sets the news
agenda for the press and the nation, Miller's reporting had a great
impact on the national debate over the wisdom of the Iraq invasion. If
she was reliably wrong about Iraq's WMD, she might have played a major
role in encouraging the United States to attack a nation that posed it
little threat.” (And see Shafer’s follow-up
article.)

***

Small changes may be afoot. In late 2003, the NYT and The
Washington Post outlined more stringent guidelines for anonymous
sourcing (The Sydney Morning Herald is finalising similar
guidelines.) But little appears to have changed in practice.

So what has Miller learnt from this episode, if
anything? The Columbia Journalism Review reported:

“On May 20 [2003], Miller gave the commencement
speech at Barnard College, her alma mater. She urged the graduates to be
skeptical about the given reasons for the war on Iraq, and particularly
of government claims about WMD. About embedding, she said that
journalists ‘need to draw conclusions about whether journalistic
objectivity was compromised . . . whether the country's interests were
best served by this arrangement.’”

Coming from the woman (and the newspaper) that did
more than most to bolster the Bush administration’s case against
Saddam on the basis of his WMD, she seems oblivious to the ongoing
problems. A mea culpa would be a wonderful start.

With journalists increasingly desperate for a scoop
and the page one lead, government officials offering “exclusive”
material would often be too hard to resist. Ray McGovern was a CIA
analyst for 27 years, working under seven US Presidents. In an interview
on June 26, 2003 McGovern revealed the way in which the Bush
administration used the major media outlets to push their case for war:

. "They [the Bush
administration] looked around after Labor Day [2002] and said, 'OK, if
we’re going to have this war, we really need to persuade Congress to
vote for it. How are we going to do that? Well, let’s do the al Qaeda-Iraq
connection. That’s the traumatic one. 9/11 is still a traumatic thing
for most Americans. Let’s do that.'

"But then they said, 'Oh damn, those folks at CIA
don’t buy that, they say there’s no evidence, and we can’t bring
them around. We’ve tried every which way and they won’t relent. That
won’t work, because if we try that, Congress is going to have these
CIA wimps come down, and the next day they’ll undercut us. How about
these chemical and biological weapons? We know they don’t have any
nuclear weapons, so how about the chemical and biological stuff? Well,
damn. We have these other wimps at the Defense Intelligence Agency, and
dammit, they won’t come around either. They say there’s no reliable
evidence of that, so if we go up to Congress with that, the next day
they’ll call the DIA folks in, and the DIA folks will undercut us.'

So they said, 'What have we got? We’ve got those
aluminum tubes!' The aluminum tubes, you will remember, were something
that came out in late September, the 24th of September. The British and
we front-paged it [ed: Judith Miller wrote the Times story]. These were
aluminum tubes that were said by Condoleeza Rice as soon as the report
came out to be only suitable for use in a nuclear application. This is
hardware that they had the dimensions of. So they got that report, and
the British played it up, and we played it up. It was front page in the
New York Times. Condoleeza Rice said, 'Ah ha! These aluminum tubes are
suitable only for uranium-enrichment centrifuges.'

(For more on the Bush administration’s appropriation
of the media pre March 2003, see Maureen Farrell’s analysis.)
Columbia Journalism Review’s Michael Massing asked Judith Miller why
so much of her reports on WMD were incorrect and distorted:

“My job isn't to assess the government's
information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is
to tell readers what the government thought of Iraq's arsenal.”

Massing responded that “many journalists would
disagree with this; instead they would consider offering an independent
evaluation of official claims [as] one of their chief
responsibilities”.

Massing noted that a number of smaller American news
organizations such as Knight Ridder did investigate rumblings inside the
intelligence communities of the Bush administration’s bellicose
pronouncements on Saddam’s arsenal, but because these services
didn’t have major outlets in Washington or New York, these stories
were frequently ignored by the NYT and the Post.)

***

Russ Baker wrote in The
Nation in June 2003 that Miller’s skills as a journalist are
impressive:

“Each time Miller produces an article that could
induce panic, she almost always mentions, some paragraphs down, that Al
Qaeda's capability to deploy or develop these types of weapons has been
judged by the Bush Administration to be crude at best. But the effect
remains the same. Miller gets a story with a whopper of a headline, the
story gets picked up and it connects with the American zeitgeist in
support of extreme measures by the Administration domestically (Patriot
Act) and internationally (invade Iraq), with few reading down to where
Miller deflates the balloon and thereby preserves her credibility, in
the same way that politicians leak and spin while preserving their
deniability.”

Baker argues that the American media star system
allowed somebody like Miller to get away with wild accusations because
she has become a source people trusted due to her high-level
governmental connections and high profile:

“A Miller appearance with CNBC's Brian Williams
during the pre-invasion propaganda campaign shows how the game is
played. Here's the intro:

‘Page one in this morning's New York Times, a report
by Judith Miller that Iraq has ordered a million doses of an anti-germ
warfare antidote. The assumption here is that Iraq is preparing to use
such weapons....

Williams: Iraq's attempt to buy large quantities of
the antidote in question was first reported by veteran New York Times
correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winner Judith Miller in this morning's
edition of the newspaper. She is also, by the way, author of the recent
book on terrorism called Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret
War. And she is with us from the Times newsroom in New York tonight.”

***

A handful of Australian journalists questioned the
rush to war pushed by Blair, Bush and Howard, including Richard Glover,
Alan Ramsey, Brian Toohey and Marion Wilkinson. Far too many, however,
accepted and pushed government propaganda on Saddam’s supposed arsenal
of WMD. As Massing says, it takes a brave person to argue against the
status quo and give prominence to dissenting voices.

Courageous reporters need to be supported by media
organisations. Editors need to listen more intently to dissenting
voices. Government sources need to be more thoroughly scrutinised.

Following the example set by UK based media watchdog medialens,
I encourage readers to write to the NYT
asking why Judith Miller’s stories have received little or no
scrutiny. Ask why her long-held connections to Chalabi haven’t been
acknowledged. Ask why the paper hasn’t examined their pre-war
reporting on WMD and printed corrections for the litany of mistakes. Ask
why unnamed government sources are continually allowed to plant
unsubstantiated information in leading articles.

* The
Guardian features a number of key players in the Iraq debate before
and after the Iraq war, including Hans von Sponeck, ex-UN humanitarian
coordinator for Iraq, Noam Chomsky and Iraqi doctors, journalists and
citizens.

* Christopher Allbritton, a former AP and New York
Daily News reporter, decided to visit Iraq to report on the run-up to
the war. He started his own blog
and became “the world’s first fully reader funded journalist blogger”.

MEDIA BRIEFS

* Moveon.org is a US based grassroots organisations
dedicated to democracy, human rights and the anti-war movement. It is
now partly funded by George Soros. It's current tV advertisement about
Donald Rumsfeld is at censure.

* Rupert Murdoch held a major conference for his staff
in Cancun, Mexico last weekend. Invited guests and speakers included the
British Tory leader, Michael Howard and Condoleeza Rice. See The
Guardian